Not the first Louisville fantasy map that I’ve featured – see Peter Dovak’s map here (March 2013) – but this one takes quite a different approach. It’s certainly grander in scale than Peter’s modest two-line system.

I will say that I adore the colour palette of this map: the muted background, river and parklands are lovely, and work nicely with the route line colours, which are also a little knocked back from the normal solid bright colours used in transit map design. The design reminds me a little of the Washington DC Metrorail (I don’t think the similarity of name is a coincidence?), although with enough differences to make it unique. The square station symbols are unusual, but work relatively well. Also, a lovely and appropriate north pointer, love it!

My main problem with the map is its labelling. As with the DC Metro map itself, we’ve got labels going off in all sorts of directions: horizontally and in all four diagonal directions. And those directions seem to be applied inconsistently: the eastern ends of the Green and Purple lines have horizontal labels, while their united western end has labels that are angled 45 degrees downwards. It just all seems a little haphazard to me. I also think that the labels for the roads and the address subtitles for the stations are too small to be useful – I can’t read them at all, even on the 2000px-wide preview on Marc’s website. That’s normally a pretty good indication of viewing a map from a distance at an actual printed size, so I think some work is needed to improve legibility. 

Source: Marc’s website – link no longer active